Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

The Case for Musical Emotions

For many people, listening to music is a deeply emotional experience, but does that tap into universal emotions?

In a 2016 study, psychologist Heike Argstatter sought to determine whether universal basic emotions are recognizable in music across cultures. This built on her previous research which found that, within one Western culture, both trained musicians and laypeople consistently categorized the same musical sequences into categories based on the same basic emotions. Now, Dr. Argstatter sought to extend these findings to audiences in disparate cultural settings.

The study began by selecting two Western groups, from Germany and Norway, as well as two sets of non-Western participants from Indonesia and South Korea. They were then played the same musical sequences used in Dr. Argstatter’s previous work, given that this music was clearly recognized as evocative of basic emotions.

Even the written descriptions of each track in Dr. Argstatter’s study evoke strong emotions. For instance, the “anger” music is depicted as loud, fast, and showcasing rising volume or rapid fire (staccato) notes. Alternatively, the music intended to evoke happiness tended to avoid dissonance and feature an uplifting or dance-like tempo.

Overall, Dr. Argstatter found evidence that all participants, regardless of culture, would identify the same emotions in the same pieces of music. This was especially true for happiness and sadness.

However, there were marked differences between cultures, as well. For instance, one of the tracks evoking “surprise” was actually interpreted as “happiness” by the Norwegian, Korean, and Indonesian participants. Similarly, “disgust” music was classified in various ways as angry, sad, or frightening, though interestingly never happy.

Still, there were some systemic cultural differences, in that the German participants and, to a lesser degree, the Norwegian ones were consistently more likely to identify the music with its intended emotion.

Dr. Argstatter saw this as demonstrating a consistent “in-group advantage,” writing “This phenomenon is known as in-group advantage: emotional cues (e.g., faces or vocal stimuli) are better recognized if the stimuli and the participants stem from the same culture.”

It is important to note that this is not inevitable but takes some work to break through. Universal emotions, as discussed at length in this blog, are displayed in similar ways across many cultures. However, this study provides valuable insights into exactly how cultural differences do change the way emotions are expressed or recognized.

Thankfully, the study of cross-cultural differences is a specialty of the folks here at Humintell! We offer comprehensive training in improving your ability to read emotions across cultures and in communicating regardless of cultural differences.

What Makes a Good People Reader?

Humintell is here to train you as a people reader, but is there anything that could make you naturally good at this skill?

It was this question which a team of researchers, including Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto, sought to answer in a 2014 study. This undertaking consisted of two experiments, one on college students with no prior professional experience in reading emotions, and another on professional behavioral analysts who work in law enforcement.

Before conducting the study, its authors hypothesized that basic attributes, such as age and sex, would have a significant impact on the ability to read microexpressions. Specifically, they predicted that women would outperform men, and that youth would correlate with better people reading.

More specific personality factors were also considered, such as the role of extraversion or openness to new experiences. Similarly, they sought to test whether previous formal training actually had a positive effect or if general confidence in one’s people reading ability helped.

In order to test these hypotheses, the researchers recruited a series of university students and, after giving them relevant personality tests, exposed them to a series of images showcasing various microexpressions and asked them to determine which emotion was being expressed. One group of participants were given no relevant microexpression training, while another group was trained prior to the study.

Of those participants with no training, younger participants who were ranked as being more open to new experiences tended to be more accurate. Interestingly, those who expressed less confidence in their abilities tended to do better as well.

This became reversed for those who underwent relevant training exercises, with the more confident participants excelling. For the post-training group, age was no longer a relevant predictor, but women who were more open to new experience performed the best. Overall, those given training were able to increase accuracy over those who were not.

In order to test the role of professional experience, a second experiment was employed. This time, professional behavior analysts from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) were recruited to see what impact this background experience would have on successful microexpression detection. Again, half were given specific training before undergoing the experiment.

For those without training, age continued to be a factor with younger officers outperforming older ones. Moreover, those given additional training before the study were significantly better than their other TSA colleagues. Contrary to the first study, moreover, personality traits and gender proved unimportant.

Another surprising finding was that those with law enforcement backgrounds before TSA were actually worse at detecting certain emotions. The study authors speculated that this is because many signs of deception are poorly understood, even by those who practice lie detection every day.

This study began a difficult process in determining whether personality traits or background are more important in the ability to read microexpressions and was unable to decide this conclusively. However, what was clear was that formal training has a major impact. Even if you are confident in your ability, or you have had to practice lie detection at work, you may not be as good at microexpression analysis as you think!

But this is what Humintell is here for! If you want to hone your skills, there is no better way than by pursuing one of our microexpression analysis courses.

Understanding through Gesture

Language has a huge influence in determining how we interact with the world, but what about nonverbal behavior?

When we speak and conceptualize the world in certain ways, we also structure our experience in order to make sense of and interact with it. In a novel 2017 study, Dr. Elizabeth Kirk and Dr. Carine Lewis sought to explore the connection between non-verbal gestures and creative problem-solving in children as a way of exploring the role that nonverbal gestures play in understanding the world.

The authors hypothesized that children’s ability to develop creative uses for everyday items depended on their capacity to freely gesture about those objects. This would allow the children to engage with these objects nonverbally in a way that allowed them to better understand their potential uses.

In the first of two experiments, a group of children between age 9 and 11 were exposed to a series of images and encouraged to develop a list of novel uses for the objects depicted in those images. Some of the children were allowed to gesticulate freely as they spoke, while another had their hands secured by Velcro and were instructed to keep their hands still.

After monitoring the experiment, the authors categorized gestures based on several criteria, such as whether they depicted the use of an object or described its spatial dimensions. This was part of an effort to make sense of which gestures had a “semantic meaning” in expressing certain thoughts, and these gestures were dubbed “iconic gestures.”

In a separate experiment, another group of children were exposed to the same set of object images, with some being encouraged actively to gesture. While, when allowed, almost all children naturally gestured, those that were encouraged to did so even more, developing a correspondingly greater number of novel uses for the objects.

In both cases, the study authors found that the ability to freely gesture helped the children develop new ideas. Interestingly, the type of object did not determine how many gestures the children would make, but they did influence the types of gestures.

Dr. Kirk and Dr. Lewis concluded that gestures do help stimulate creativity in children. They contended that, by gesturing, children were better able to understand important features of the objects and determine how best to act on this knowledge.

This research fits well into the assumption that gestures help us structure our world. This underscores how important nonverbal behavior is in understanding both the world around us and the other people we encounter within it.

Previous blogs have explored how certain gestures seem universal across cultures and the importance of nonverbal behavior in face to face interaction. For those who are curious to learn more, Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto leads a fantastic webinar on the role of gestures in interpersonal communication!